Ajami, ethnic cleansing one step further, unless the high court stops it

Last Wednesday judge Zafet of the Tel Aviv district court heard the case of 28 Jaffa residents (honesty demands to say that i'm one of them) against the Israel Land Administration and the Be'emuna company who won the tender for a piece of land right in the middle of Ajami. Originally Palestinian owned, declared "absentee property" and finally "publicly owned" and sold by the Israel Land Administration by tender to the highest bidder, the Be'emuna company. Until here everything has the appearance of "stinking but kosher" according to Israeli law. We were represented by lawyers Gil Gan Mor and Dan Yakir of the Israel Association for Civil Rights.

Until a few years ago, our market took place on the plot. The market was closed by the municipality for no reason (or so it appeared at the time) and no other plot was offered for the purpose of creating a new market, leaving us, the Jaffa population as well as many people from Bat Yam and Tel Aviv, as well as small farmers from the central area of the country, without a cheap  fresh food market, a true necessity in an impoverished area such as Jaffa. 

Yet the Be'emuna company is NOT just another building company out to make a good profit. They marketed the flats planned on to be constructed by them on the Ajami plot, to the members of one very specific group only: Zionist religious Jews. They put it bluntly on their website, but just to make sure, we also called them, interested in buying a cheap flat on their plot. Not very surprisingly, we were refused. Private companies can sell to whom they like, but NOT when the land was previously publicly owned, as in this case and according to the "Ka'aden" high court ruling.

The company's efforts are part of a well orchestrated and funded, much larger effort to expel the Palestinian population from the shared Palestinian and Jewish towns and cities in Israel. It appears that after the disengagement from Gaza some of the settlers and their colonially minded friends decided settling in the West Bank was no longer an ideological necessity for them. Instead they decided to address Israel's mixed cities with their racist ideology. The process is under its way in Accre, Lod, Ramle, Haifa, Nazareth Elite as well as in Jaffa. And there is nothing friendly or innocent about it.

We are talking about a concentrated effort to "replace" the original Palestinian residents with Jewish ones; Not to live together and share our cultures but to expel the Palestinians from their homes and "Judaize" the area.

During the previous sessions the judge had made remarks which led us to conclude that he is not as impartial as he should be. Therefore we asked him to dismiss himself, which he refused.

The verdict was sent to us yesterday afternoon: not surprisingly the judge decided in favor of the colonialist project.

We will have to appeal our case to the Supreme Court.

Black forces in a not so orange orange grove

When demolished, a home makes an awful sound. Yesterday it went on for hours, the slow demolition process of the second floor of the Dake home. Large yellow machines slowly crunched away at the building. Huge blocks of falling concrete demolishing the garden in the same go.
The people watching on helplessly. Their possessions, clothes, furniture, kids' schoolbooks etc. out in the dust.

Two years ago some 100 people barricaded themselves on the roof of the Dake home in Jaffa's Dake orange grove and prevented its demolition. Yesterday the Dake family were less, much less lucky, when Ron Huldai's municipality goons demolished their home under the "protection" of hundreds of blimp led ninja-style clad special forces policemen.

In the early hours masked policemen entered the Dake home and arrested the men of the family and told the family's women to start packing. Literally hundreds of policemen, special forces and border police blocked off all roads to the Dake grove and the close surroundings.

Whole streets were closed to the public, even to those living there and wishing to go back home. The operations were led from a special command tent where police men kept track of the ground forces by means of a camera studded blimp high up in the air.

To understand the true impact of the demolition of the Dake house is is important to back in history.

The Dake family were the proud owners of a huge orange grove prior to 1948, the Naqbe, just south of Jaffa. 

In the grove were the large family home, storage facilities, guard houses, a pump house etc.

After 1948 the family stayed on. They lived in the grove and over time, as the family expanded, more houses were added. 

The municipality did not bother to make a zoning plan for the grove, although it is on municipal territory. As a result, it is impossible to receive a building permit for anything, not even for repairing your house: as there are no zoning plan definitions for the area, there is no buroicratic procedure possible for getting a building permit.

Yet the Dakes, who own the land, needed homes, so they constructed those without a permit.

The municipality never provided any services in the grove, there are no roads, no waste disposal, no kinder garden (by now there are a few hundred people, including many children, living in the grove). The sewage system is horrid and floods every now and then and until a few years ago every winter the grove was flooded. Only after a young child drowned inside his home, the municipality did something about the flood drains.

The lack of a zoning plan has been going on for some 60 years now. The Dakes cannot build anything on their land and live in poverty. When they try to build the municipality arrives and destroys. The houses  are rebuilt, making use of cheap materials or recycling some of the rubble in the construction of the new house, as all know it is only a matter of time until the next demolition.

After the municipality took out a demolition order on the flat he built for his son, Moussa Dake decided to fight back. He lost in the Tel Aviv peace court, but won an incredible victory in the regional court, where the judge criticised the municipality for 60 years of planning neglect. The Dakes felt victorious and the verdict was f major importance as it had implications for many other areas in the country as well.

But the municipality appealed to the high court of justice and won. The verdict in this case was formalistic and did not even try to deal with the serious criticism and legal concerns of the regional court's verdict.

The Dakes appealed once more, but the municipality decided not to wait for the court's decision and yesterday, in spite of the request to wait until the verdict, the goons went about their ugly business.

Moussa had become a symbol and the legal fight he put up was being followed by many involved in planning and housing rights.

  

The crime of being poor as defined by the Tel Aviv municipality

Yafo Gimmel is located at the very southern end of Jaffa, almost Bat Yam. Nowhere close to any of the fancier locations much in request by the gentrifyers and real estate investors looking of yet another option to make a lot of quick money.

Long concrete blocks with many entrances, "shikunim" as we call them. No elevators, small box-like flats stacked one on top of the other. You always know what the neighbors are at, the walls are thin.

When Jaffa's lovely old buildings were demolished some 40-30 years ago, many of their Jewish inhabitants received public housing flats in the large estates of "Yafo Gimmel" and "Yafo Daled", thinking they had made the deal of their lifetime. No longer would they have to share the same kitchen and bathroom with several other families in Ajami's old crumbling mansions of pre-naqbe age. Instead they would have their own little kingdom with the unknown luxury of a private kitchen and shower. Very small, that's true, and not too well contructed, but it was their own, rented for a relatively low monthly fee from the public housing company.

Over time, those who did well moved out and new migrants from the ex-Soviet Union and very recently, Ethiopia, took their place. The public housing company sold them their flats for a thieving  very "reasonable"  price and all felt they, once more , had made a good deal; they had become home owners. 
Of course the tiny and by now quite old homes were (and are) heavily morgaged and the monthly payments weigh heavy on the population many of whom have become unemployed and dependent on ever shrinking social security payments or on minimum wages. Food isn't always secure. Medicine cannot always be bought when necessary. Very few children have all the school books they need, but at least their families own their own homes. And that gave many of the people living in the Yafo Gimmel's Saharon street a (false) sense of security.

The public housing company's maintenance standards had always been low (and that is an understatement) and the construction level of the buildings was less than shoddy to start with. And the poor homeowners pay all their money to meet with the morgage requirements, leaving very little for necessary home repairs.

Two years ago the municipality defined a large block in Saharon Street, with close to 100 flats devided over 10 entrances, as "dangerous" and the demanded the home owners carry out immediate extensive (and very expensive) repairwork to the crumbling structure.

In the past this sort of work would have been taken care of by the Neighborhood Renewal Project ("Shikum Shkunot" שיקום שכונות) and the inhabitants would have had to pay only part of the cost against a friendly loan certified by the project. Yet but the Neighborhood Renewal project was fazed out in Jaffa (well, officially it still exists, its total annual budget for all of Jaffa standing at 20.000 NIS for 2009 which is being used as a partial salary for some educational work in the center of Jaffa as far as i know) .

The inhabitants of the block did not carry out the necessary repairwork. They simply don't have the money to do so.

In addition, many of them simply don't speak the same language (Russian and Amharic are more popular here) and in any case it is difficult to organize such a large group of inhabitants (over 90 densely populated flats).

So the burocrats of the municipality thought they had a good solution. One that tends to work quite well in North Tel Aviv: a law suit. One that usually forces the refusenik home owner into compliance.

The Tel Aviv - Yafo municipality criminally sues every single adult inhabitant of the block!

"Criminal"? one wonders. Yes, not carrying out a repair order of this type is a criminal offence, as the criminally inclined homeowner endangers all those living in the building or passing near by. It might collapse if the repairs will not be carried out.

The option of criminally suing repair refusing home owners was made to force slum landlords into taking care of the buildings they own. That law was not made in order to abuse poor people who were tricked into building their homes from a public housing company that wanted to get rid of property on which they would have to spend much money. The real slum landlord is the public housing company (partially municipality owned) that made a lot of money selling the flats, instead of spending it in repairing those very same flats.

How stupid can the thought police get?

The short answer? Very, very, very stupid.
And dangerous.

I'm relating of course to the "Naqbe" law, which, if passed, will forbid Israeli citizens to undertake public activities in commemoration of the Palestinian catastrophe, the Naqbe.

Democracy includes the freedom of expression and freedom of the press. According to the proposed law, indicating "Naqbe Day" will be a criminal offence. Israel has never really been a true democracy according to accepted international standards, but the current government are showing their true and very ugly face.

The law proposal is supported by the minister of justice, Yacov Ne'eman as well as by the minister of education, Gideon Sa'ar. When similar racist law proposals were suggested a few years ago, they would be judged as racist and non-democratic by the knesset's legal councellor and find their way to their proper place, the nearest garbage can.

I don't think we can ever create a true peace with the Palestinians, if we do not recognize their catastrophe, when the majority of them became refugees and lost almost all they had. By making the very mentioning of the Naqbe an offence, we are creating yet more distance from a true peace agreement. And it is not the politicians who will be paying the price.
All of us will do so. Everybody's blood is red.